Goal of the meeting:

Kickoff meeting for rewriting and reorganising the documentation on WordPress.org regarding web accessibility.
We want the documentation set up so that it’s complete, without duplicates, easy to find and put it on places where people actually will read it.

We report and discuss our work every Thursday in the #accessibility Slack channel

The goal is to write one topic a week per person

When the topics are added to the handbook, we will review the current documentation on wp.org to see where we can ask the teams to replace/add/modify text to prevent double info and to link to better information.

For the topics we want to keep a template, for example:

Topic

Short intro with:

Good Practice

Bad Practice

Why

Exceptions

Examples

Resources with links

We don’t want to copy all the info there already is on the web, but point to good info and examples.

Today I started to add subsections to the Accessibility Handbooks Contributor Spreadsheet and while I was looking over other Handbooks (Docs in particular) I decided it might be best to streamline content even further to separate Informational content about the team, mission, etc from the actual Resource for Developers. Documentation has a Docs Handbook for their section as well as links to other Handbooks for Developers. I’d like to see Accessibility follow that format and have reached out to @sewmyheadon and @topher1kenobe to get some insight into how they approached the process.

H1 in the admin

For 4.3 there will be an H1 in the admin. #31650: Missing H1 heading in the admin. Assistive technology users look for the H1 for way finding. Though there is the page title, when AT separates out elements such as links, lists, and headings, the info needs to be there too. Two weeks ago we ran this by Mika Epstein @Ipstenu and she helped us understand heading levels and plugins. Mika spot checked some plugins and it showed that they are using H2 and her opinion is that “we can post about that in make/plugins to try and spread the word.” Thanks Mika. More work will be done on the rest of the hierarchy.

Weekly Meeting Change

This week during the Wednesday meeting we decided that the Monday testing meeting is now where the action is so we decided to stop having the Wednesday meeting. On Monday, May 4, we will all meet in the #accessibility channel in Slack at 18:00 UTC. We are also using Slack throughout the week to work on tickets and patches, ask questions, and discuss anything that comes up. First register for the WordPress forums and then follow the steps on the WordPress chat instruction page to get set up. Then find your way to #accessibility. See you there!

Testing

We had a report by Rian Rietveld on testing results. Things are going very well. Rian said: “I’m getting test results back on the tab order of the post table, it seems to work ok, but they found a ton of other problems, I have to check the current tickets and open new if necessary.”

Pattern Library

Core Discussion

Andrea Fercia reported on a discussion he had with the Core team. He asked about menu bar admin focus and non-link links (28599 and 26504). Joe Dolson said “the link/button question really requires specific cases; I’m not sure how we could approach giving any kind of global comments on the topic.” Andrea said that he also updated the Core team about the first testing round on customizer theme switcher.

Theme Checking

Joe Dolson updated us on the state of checking themes requesting the accessible-ready tag.”We’re now up to 29 live themes carrying the accessibility-ready tag which have been tested and passed. There’s one outstanding theme live that does not pass (_tk); it’s undergoing the review process now, and will either be suspended or updated soon.I’ve got two pending theme reviews to do, and know of at least 1 theme that’s currently approved and waiting to go live.”
Joe has also trained two of the theme review team admins on reviewing for accessibility. Additionally Joe has shifted support for landmark roles into a required feature for accessibility-ready themes, rather than recommended.

Landmarks

Discussion turned to the over-abundance of landmarks. The current proposed code (#23089) outputs too many landmark roles. A theme may add numerous landmark roles without the ability to control where and how many there are. Andrea noted “currently, _s outputs one aside (mapped to complementary) for each widget, nested inside a general complementary area for widgets.” Jared Smith of WebAim recently said “Easy accessibility check: Search for “role” in source code. If 0 instances, probably bad. If 1-20, probably OK. If greater than 20, definitely awful.”

Other Items

Morten Rand-Hendriksen asked: “What is the best tool for computer voice control (in particular, voice controlled browsing) on both Windows and MacOS? Are there any workable free tools or are we confined to things like Dragon?” There is a demo mode in JAWS and NVDA is free. If there is a free way for developers and designers to experience things using voice control it will help them understand the issues better.Sam Sidler noted that “OS X has voice control built-in, so I’d call that free, but not open source-level free.”

We finished off by discussing Shiny Updates (see ticket 29820 now landed in core). According to Andrea Fercia there are two main accessibility issues:

Weekly Testing Meeting

For the last two weeks we’ve been trying something new, a weekly accessibility testing meeting, 17:00 – 19:30 UTC. We meet in the wordpress-ui IRC channel to share our tests. If you want to join in or just see what we are doing just show up in the IRC channel. Read the logs for August 18 and August 25 to get an idea of what we are doing.

Three of the staff from DAC gave us feedback on using the WordPress admin screens. Each of the three have a particular impairment, and the visit was a valuable opportunity to learn about ways we could improve WordPress for everyone.

In this post we take feedback from Carly who is totally blind. She showed us how she used a screen reader and gave us some great feedback on using the WordPress admin screens with a screen reader.

Three of the staff from DAC gave us feedback on using the WordPress admin screens. Each of the three have a particular impairment, and the visit was a valuable opportunity to learn about ways we could improve WordPress for everyone.